Love Is All You Knit


Undecided
November 30, 2008, 7:50 pm
Filed under: Yarn, knitting

So I finished the first ball of Brooks Farm Four Play (270 yards!) on my Shredded Wheat scarf last night.  Then, I started to think I could squeeze out a pair of mittens from the second ball, as well as finishing off the scarf.

shredded-wheat2

But if I made the scarf to just any old length, I couldn’t guarantee to have enough to make a pair of mittens.  So I decided that I could do the mittens first, then use all the leftover yarn to finish off the scarf since scarf length isn’t as crucial as having enough yarn to finish off that last inch of your second mitt.

So I scoured the ‘net and found a pattern for flip-top-mitts and cast on this morning.  Now that I’m almost done with the cuff of the first one, I’m having second thoughts.

cuff

I just don’t know how well 50% wool/50% silk mitts will hold up.  My fingerless dashings are made with a pretty hearty wool and they are already starting to pill.  Maybe I should just finish off the scarf and make a hat with the remaining yarn.  (Though I don’t know how much I like matchy-matchy hat and scarves…)

Thoughts?  I really want to do some knitting tonight, but I just can’t make up my mind!



A Long Way From Home on Thanksgiving
November 28, 2008, 1:15 pm
Filed under: Family

Well, I had my first Thanksgiving away from home.  I don’t know what to think- it was Thanksgiving, but not Thanksgiving.  We did have some new traditions to enjoy, like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from a friend’s office on Broadway and 57th Street.  

dora

hello-kitty1

energizer

I roasted my first Turkey yesterday, too.  It was juicy and tasted like Turkey, so I’m calling it a success.  We had all sorts of friends over and it was a really nice day.

I guess I’m just really feeling the distance because there’s a new little person that I haven’t been able to meet yet:

levi

This is little Levi Spencer, my new nephew.  Can’t wait to see him modeling the February Baby Sweater that I knitted for him.  (Ahem…. Kasi, that means you need to send me some more pics!)

Oh, and Henry wanted to tell you guys that he started his own blog…

houndstail

http://ahoundstail.wordpress.com

 



The Unbearable Cuteness of Being Henry
November 22, 2008, 10:37 pm
Filed under: Dogs

Sigh…

henry2It’s a hard life being this cute.  To tell you the truth, sometimes it really gets me down…

henry3It is exhausting trying to maintain this high level of cuteness at all times….

henry1Sometimes I just wanna be me

henry42And then I remember just how fabulous I am!



I Think He Likes It
November 18, 2008, 7:55 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

r2d23



Injuries, Apples, and Breakfast Cereals
November 16, 2008, 8:24 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Injuries first:
A week ago today we started out the morning with a few bloody marys. There is a dog-friendly place around the corner that has a great DIY bloody mary bar as well as fun board games, so we all decided to stop in for a stretch. I had my first experience playing Apples to Apples, and I highly recommend it. After we had our fill of vodka drinks, we headed home for a bit to enjoy the rest of our day. I took Henry by the leash and decided to take him for a bit of a run.  We sped off and then circled back to the group.  Henry decided to circle right in front of me and the leash tripped me.   Joey and Aaron had been standing outside wondering what the heck I was doing, so they got to see the whole thing as it happened: my right knee took the brunt of the fall, then I fell onto my right side and slid a few feet while Henry was still running.  I just lay there on the cement for a minute and listened to Joey and Aaron freaking out about what had just happened.  They ran over to me and helped me up and I just bent over in a large amount of pain, but also laughing really hard cause I knew how silly it had looked.  I ended up with road rash on my hip and my shoulder, a bruise on my left ankle, right elbow and right knee.  The knee bruise was the worst.  I was limping for two days and it is still tender to the touch a week later:

db1

DB Strikes Again!

Then on Friday, Joey was walking around on Bedford Avenue looking at something across the street, and walked right into a road sign.  It hit him right on the ear and he was kind of stunned for a second then he just kept on walking, hoping nobody saw what just happened.  A few minutes later he felt something dripping down his ear and it was blood.  I don’t have a picture of it, but it got him right on the upper edge of his ear.  It actually took a small chunk of cartilage off!

Okay, now that I’ve grossed you out, on to breakfast cereals: When I was little, we used to always have a box of Kellogg’s Shredded Wheat on hand. I liked the frosted kind but you had to eat it quickly before the milk disintegrated all of the frosting. Otherwise, you were left with soggy, wheaty, mush. I started a new scarf the other night and the yarn color is reminding me of frosted shredded wheat cereal:

shredded-wheat1

Frosted Whole-Grain Goodness



R2D2, Where Are You?
November 12, 2008, 8:46 pm
Filed under: knitting
r2dd22

Hanging out with Chewie, of course!

Quite a while ago, my friend Josh was perusing his Google Reader and came across a post about a knitted R2D2 Beanie that was all the rage among a certain genre of folks. My friend, being a male born in the late-seventies couldn’t resist, and forwarded a link to the pattern to his knitting friend (me). I promised to knit him one, and then waited 10 months or so before I finally decided to bite the bullet and kick this thing out.
Thoughts? Well, I’m not very pleased with the duplicate stitching. This pattern requires you to do quite a bit of it. My inner perfectionist-knitter has a small problem with the way the color underneath peeks out here and there, but I’m sure any non-knitter could care less. (Stranded knitting was also an option which I tried the first go-around. I kept those strands extremely loose, but they weren’t loose enough to stretch over my head and I knew they wouldn’t stretch enough to fit over Josh’s 23 1/2″ noggin.)
I am pretty pleased with the KnitPicks Swish Superwash yarn I used. This is my first time working with it and it was perfect for this project: soft and machine washable. Exactly what a guy needs.
Would I knit this hat again? No way. Not because of the pattern or anything, but just cause it was a pain in the ass. Only for Josh.